by Hammond, Ray
Al Lynch had suggested, half seriously, that NSA, CIA and UNISA technology might seem old-hat to someone employed by a corporation able to crack the world’s encryption systems. Jack had laughingly explained that he had little personal experience of the Tye Corporation’s technology, having only observed what some of it could do. Tye never bothered himself with technical details these days, and he was only interested in meeting the sales prospect, doing the demo, then handing the sales process on to the technical consultants for completion. In fact, Jack realized, computing and communications had become an almost invisible part of everyday life for millions, something everyone took for granted.
‘You realize how I received my instructions about your visit, Jack?’ Lynch laughed. ‘A courier flew down from New York with a briefcase chained to his wrist. It was a Cold War relic. They must have got it from a museum. But when I read the papers, I understood. We really do have to assume that your target has cracked the principles of prime-number key encryption. Is that right, Jack?’
Jack nodded. ‘So UNISA assumes, Al. But they have no idea how that could be possible.’
‘Nor me, either,’ mused Lynch, ‘and I thought I was pretty well up in this area. Ciphers are one of my specialities – I did encryption theory for my PhD thesis . . .’
He tailed off in thought. Then he looked up again.
‘But if the Tye Corporation can do so, it means that everything we normally provide for secure communications is now useless. That’s always the inevitable implication for any civil or military authority after such a breakthrough. If they can crack the highest levels of encryption they can then just set up robot watchers in every hub on the networks. These would automatically intercept every communication that mentions Tye, his companies, his competitors, or organizations like ours, and copy them to his . . .’ He tailed off again.
‘Come to think of it, they could read any communication in the world, and if they can get into our databases, they could read every military secret we have. Jesus . . .’
Jack nodded.
‘It means everything we’ve now got, all this comms kit, is junk – it’s useless.’ Lynch waved at the benches covered with minute wearable communications and surveillance devices.
Jack nodded again. He thought of making a joke about homing pigeons, but he could see that Lynch was deadly serious. He was working up to something.
‘This gave me quite a challenge, Jack. And I had no idea that I was doing it for you, of course. But I’m delighted, delighted.’
He turned his wheelchair to the bench and lifted the plastic cover from a small piece of equipment. He turned back and handed it over. Jack took the device with a puzzled frown.
‘It doesn’t look much different to an early VideoMate,’ said Lynch. ‘But it is.’
He leaned forward and pointed to a slot that ran the whole length of the underside. ‘This is a little fax feed, Jack, like they used to provide on the first generation of VideoMates, only I’ve modified this machine so that it doesn’t send ordinary faxes. When you press this button it produces old-fashioned one-time codes at random and applies them to speech or keyboard input.’
Jack raised his eyebrows. One-time codes, for centuries the most secure form of encryption for covert communication, had disappeared long before he had joined the intelligence services: the topic was not even covered on any of the courses he had attended.
‘You dictate the message, Jack, and the processor generates the one-time code – it’s completely random, so no chance of patterns occurring. You connect this machine to a dedicated phone line and send the message as a fax, a bitmapped graphic, not as live text, and it’s received at the other end and printed out on paper as plain text. Nothing must remain in a memory anywhere. This VideoMate doesn’t have any radio links or network ports, Jack. They’re all disabled. You get one printout of the one-time code and that’s it. After that it doesn’t exist any more.’
‘So how do I get the one-time key to UNISA or whoever I’m faxing?’ asked Jack.
‘Ah, that’s the weak link,’ admitted Lynch. ‘Ideally you should hand it to them personally. But that rather defeats the object, doesn’t it?’
‘I have to agree, Al,’ he said. Lynch didn’t seem to notice his sarcasm.
‘But I think you can risk faxing it over a second dedicated fax line, like we used to use until everything went Internet protocol. We’ll just have to install a couple on Hope Island or wherever you’re going. It should be safe: we’ll provide a massive white-noise wrapping and we’ll know if anybody is tapping it. Even if it was compromised the beauty of one-time codes is there’s never enough information to allow a computer program to decipher the pattern. There are too few occurrences. Also, I can’t imagine that your target has set up robot intercepts for bitmap graphics. No one has ever used one-time codes in fax transmissions. They disappeared way before faxes came in and went out again.’
‘Back to the future,’ said Jack, smiling as he recalled a saying from his childhood.
Lynch looked at him blankly.
*
‘Shall we go to full throttle?’ suggested Stella Witherspoon diplomatically. The captain nodded his approval to the helmsman and with a roaring surge the ninety-foot offshore patrol craft rose to its full planing height.
‘Sixty-two knots, that’s about it,’ shouted the Captain after a few minutes.
‘How far are they?’ yelled Stella as she clung on to a grab rail. It was her turn to ride with one of Hope Island’s coastal patrol craft: every few months her boss made each of his section heads take a week’s night shift with the coastal patrols – even those who belonged to the Presidential Protection Team. It was just past midnight and misty.
The navigator indicated the converging shapes on his combined radar, infrared and satellite-imaging screen: the information from the three systems was integrated to provide a detailed graphic display.
‘About three minutes at this speed,’ the captain shouted at her. ‘They’re hove-to.’
The Cuban patrol vessel appeared as a red icon on the screen. They were closing quickly.
The captain lifted a flap on the control panel and pressed a red button. ‘Go to weapons drill,’ he ordered unnecessarily as the klaxon sounded.
Crew members appeared on deck and manned the forward laser-guided cannon and the aft machine guns. They watched as they converged on the incident.
‘Ship ho,’ called a crewman.
The captain nodded and the helmsman cut the throttles. The craft settled and the roar of the engines gave way to an idling burble. They rocked in near-silence for a minute as they stared into the mist.
The staccato sound of a machine gun broke the peace, and lines of red tracer flew over their heads. One of the crewmen turned on a searchlight and swung its beam across the sea.
‘There,’ shouted the helmsman.
The Cuban patrol boat and a crudely built oil-drum raft were caught in the intense white glare. They had been engaged in hauling fleeing rebel supporters on board. One youth was still clinging to a net on the side of the old gunboat. Sailors lined the rail, automatic weapons trained on the would-be asylum seekers.
Another burst of machine-gun fire from the Cuban vessel created a red carpet of tracer fire over the Hope Island patrol vessel, lower this time.
‘Not very friendly,’ observed Stella.
This type of mid-sea confrontation had been going on for nearly a year, since a Cuban craft had come upon a Hope Island patrol boat lifting escaping rebel soldiers from the water. Havana had complained that far more of its citizens were landing in Hope Island than were returned.
‘Position?’ asked the captain quietly.
‘Borderline, sir,’ responded the navigator, peering at his display. ‘Right on the line. Might be our waters, might be international.’
‘They wouldn’t really be a problem,’ sighed the captain to Ms Witherspoon. But he already knew her response.
‘’Fraid not, Captain. The standing or
ders are unchanged.’
‘Let’s go home,’ ordered the captain. As his craft turned away he spat pointedly but impotently out of the side window, in the direction of the Cuban craft, and went below.
Chapter Ten
Tye Life Sciences was suffering from a serious problem: in one key division it was unable to keep up with an overwhelming, insatiable global demand for certain highly personalized and very intimate products and services. The problem had become so severe that, two years before, Thomas Tye had personally taken responsibility for finding a solution. Above all, he hated losing revenue.
He solved the problem by inventing a new health-care concept and by founding a new company to deliver it. He was very proud that the idea for LifeLines Inc. was entirely his. The early results indicated that the severe shortage of biological products was already being reduced.
After a last-minute change of plans and some frantic rescheduling, he was to ‘open’ his new operation officially this morning. He whistled under his antibacterial mask as he rippled through the hermetically sealed clothes bags in his wardrobe, deciding what to wear for the hastily arranged ceremony.
TLS, as the life-sciences group of companies was known inside the Tye Corporation, had been founded soon after the parent company moved to Hope Island. In overall charge of research in the TLS group was Professor Stanley H. Walczack, a sixty-eight-year-old mathematical biologist and reprogeneticist whom Thomas Tye had personally courted for three years before he had been persuaded to leave his chair at Washington State University and relocate to Hope Island. As well as asking Walczack to direct research at TLS, Tye also invited him to become the first incumbent of a chair in Life Sciences that the corporation was endowing at the new Hope Island University.
At first, Walczack had turned him down flat, citing the inestimable benefit of working with so many like-minded colleagues in a non-commercial environment. After all, he was a MacArthur Award-winner and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and he felt that his life’s work and reputation depended on him remaining in mainstream American academic life.
Then Tye persuaded the professor and his wife to visit Hope Island for a weekend. Walczack hadn’t been finally induced to consider the offer seriously until late on the afternoon on which he was due to return to Seattle. Tye had already driven the Walczacks around the new university campus and cited the impressive list of other academics who had already committed to creating a ‘knowledge nursery’ on Hope Island. He sensed that Mrs Walczack was already won over and Tye had taken the professor into his office to reveal some of the work currently in progress within the research organizations that would make up the Tye Life Sciences group.
The biologist was amazed by the research that Tye described. He was fascinated by Erasmus’s discovery of the progeria gene string and its role in cellular sclerosis and the antiageing therapy it was developing. He was also impressed to find that his host and benefactor had a grasp of biotechnology that was at least doctorate level.
It had still taken another six months to secure Walczack’s formal commitment and a further twelve months of protracted negotiations between Washington State University and the new Hope Island University before Walczack had been able to delight his nagging wife by moving into one of the new white villas overlooking Hope Town. Now, over a decade later, Hope Island University and the Tye Life Sciences group occupied the leading position in the world’s theoretical and applied life-science research community.
The first TLS success under Walczack’s leadership had been PerPetuals, the pet-cloning technique developed personally by the professor. This service was launched in the North American market from a string of PerPetuation Centers wholly owned by Tye Life Sciences. Within two years TLS had franchised reproductive pet-cloning laboratories in all developed territories.
The second major service launched by TLS had gained such success that response had been overwhelming. It was this insatiable demand, and the severe shortages it caused, that had prompted Thomas Tye to create the concept for LifeLines Inc. two years earlier.
Tye Life Sciences had pioneered the laboratory growth of replacement human organs. Working from stem cells into which a patient’s own DNA was grafted, the researchers successfully grew livers, kidneys, hearts, lungs, hands, feet, sex organs, skin, eyes and neural tissue that, because of their perfect genetic match, could be transplanted into the original DNA provider without fear of rejection and without the need for the powerful immunosuppressant drugs that had previously been the main problem in the aftercare of transplant patients. Usually a transplant from genetically identical tissue returned the sufferer to excellent health within days.
From the outset, doctors in North America, Europe and Japan had been enthusiastic about the process. Wealthy patients who were still well enough to travel flocked to Hope Island for tax-free surgery paid for with tax-free money. Soon there was a lengthy waiting list for organs to be grown and transplants to be undertaken. The Hope Island Medical Clinic was extended twice in the first two years after it opened and the TLS laboratories expanded to cover thirty-one acres.
By itself, this achievement was remarkable but not unique. Several other research facilities around the world announced similar successes in growing cloned organs and, for the brief period the subject had held the media’s attention, scores of happy auto-transplant patients told television reporters how wonderful it was to feel well again.
What was unique about the work undertaken at Tye Life Sciences was the third project to be headed personally by Professor Stanley H. Walczack that he had started soon after arrival on Hope Island. After two and a half years of development, TLS filed patents for a universal organ-support and long-term storage unit called MatchBox. Further patents, filed three months later, described a similar but portable device.
MatchBox solved a problem that was severely limiting the therapeutic work that the world’s transplant surgeons could undertake with farmed organs. The device kept newly grown organs healthy for an indeterminate period. Without such a device an organ could be kept healthy for only a few days after it had reached maturity and been harvested.
For his MatchBox, Walczack personally designed and manipulated a gene string from which a universal placenta could be grown: a biological interface that could quickly grow supporting tissue connections to the very different arteries, veins, nerves and conductive tissues found in the various organs that were under cultivation. Walczack’s master stroke was in coaxing the gene string to mimic the way female reproductive systems switch off their immune-system defences when an embryo, which is wholly foreign tissue, is welcomed and nourished by the placenta. Within a year of starting MatchBox manufacture Tye Life Sciences had sufficient stocks to be able to announce the launch of a new service described in their literature as POB – Pre-emptive Organ Banking.
The response to the new POB service from Tye Life Sciences was overwhelming. Many wealthy and perfectly healthy individuals wanted the security of having back-ups of their vital organs and waiting lists started to grow alarmingly.
At first, Tye was in favour of steadily increasing the price for these standby organs until a natural rationing occurred. But his marketing economists developed a complexity-pricing model that produced the maximum financial yield while ensuring demand remained high. The range of price variations was enormous and contracts were tailored for each client. Some paid hefty premiums to have their organs duplicated quickly and then moderate storage fees during the period that TLS kept them against potential need. Others paid lower duplication fees but higher storage costs. The TLS pricing system computed an individual’s price structure from the number of organs ordered at one time, the patient’s genetic background, medical history, LifeWatch ambulatory data (which, helpfully, indicated current health status), actuarial tables, and also the customer’s preferred payment terms. Existing customers of the many Tye-Managed Healthcare Schemes around the world received loyalty discounts, but no customer paid exactly the same price as any other and
no customer received exactly the same service.
TLS and MatchBox gave the rich and successful another personal luxury to aim for: an ultimate acquisition that ranked alongside their personal jets, classic-car collections and luxury yachts. The richest customers wanted every one of their vital organs – and some of the less vital – grown and kept available in case of future need.
It was over the issue of how best to deal with requests for help from seriously ill customers unable to afford a priority fee that Walczack and his patron had suffered their first serious disagreement. ‘Your work has to be protected,’ insisted Tye. ‘We own the patents for twenty-five years and there’s another eighteen to go.’ He could have added that the corporation had still not recovered all the development costs, and licence income was not the most efficient way to go about it.
Walczack had tendered his resignation immediately. But Tye had smiled, put his arm around the professor’s shoulders and asked him, as a personal favour, to delay his decision.
When Walczack saw Tye’s plans for the seventh-generation LifeWatches and the new market that would result, the professor had suspended his threat of resignation. Tye had then cemented their new agreement by bestowing an additional tranche of stock options in the new company on the pioneering professor.
Thomas Tye selected a pair of blue chinos to go with his white shirt, removing them from their sterile container. He took the elevator down to his office where he handed Connie an envelope and issued instructions about Calypso. Then he pulled a spreadsheet onto the wall screen and ran over the projections for LifeLines’s stock-market flotation.
*
Raymond Liu sat alone in Network Control Center on Hope Island. The Group Technical Director of Tye Network Systems was baffled. His teams had spent three weeks investigating the short but highly dangerous intermittent failures of the air-traffic-control satellites over Northern California and the near-disastrous loss of satellite communications in the Australasian quadrant. But they still had no idea what might have caused such bizarre independent system failures.
